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<title>honey in the vulture's skull by vibracobra</title>
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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/26831947">honey in the vulture's skull</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/vibracobra/pseuds/vibracobra'>vibracobra</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>LISA (Video Games), LISA: The Pointless</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>M/M</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-10-05</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-10-05</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 11:41:15</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>897</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/26831947</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/vibracobra/pseuds/vibracobra</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <em>"I don't know where I'm going."</em>
</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Alex Churchland/Joel Miller</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>11</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>honey in the vulture's skull</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>He was in the desert.</p><p>It was here in the blinding luminescence of bare rolling earth, of some obscurity under the white sun, it's color rust and siftless and iron hot under the pale of open sky, no shade nor any sign of life for what seemed like the expanse of this world. It was here that Alex wondered why.</p><p>The note was solemn and quiet to the bombardment of irritation that racked all outward senses. Hard grain in the eyes and nose and mouth and the heavy weight that his raw soles worked against, a screaming heat overhanging. The apathy scattered and fluttered, flaring with each repeated buffet of sand that felt unreasonable and undeserved. He was sweating furiously. Shabby and floured with dust, sunblind such that all around him was corrosive light. He had been walking for a very long time.</p><p>He passed little. Unnatural formations of rocks, calcite, spines of petrified wood. A scatter of animal bones white and incandescent even in the quivering air. Two mud pueblos, their silhouettes ominous and their shadows harsh, slanted and deeply black. Pieces of flint and crude ceramic strewn about. What felt like the remains of a past culture, days or years.</p><p>Alex moved among the lonely shelters. He found that their walls encased the heat of the air more densely, and it took a few moments to adjust to their darkness. Here in one residues of death. Stains of old blood. A thing inked in shadow laying in the corner against the dry bricks, it's spindled tibia and fibula outstretched, at first glance a phantom. A man. His flesh taut and leathery and immune to time or the scavenge of snarling flies or buzzard bills, eternal and free of violent decay. He wore a tattered red rag, shining faintly and holding a vague familiarity. Perched on the bent neck a head of two faces, both sunken, sleeping. Alex felt a palm on his back that motioned him to leave. Again they walked. They did not see anything else.</p><p>A larger gust or an overburdening of the lungs, Alex hacked, painfully, breaking the pace that he had set. He staggered and fell down. Onto the scorched clay, bracing himself an Olympian task. His palms singed with filaments of fire and the baking earth. Arms quivering as he felt his bones strain. He stared at the blinding ground and the off-white shadow he had cast. Empty and uncertain. Curling cold fingers into the gut. A cloud within him.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>"<em>I don't know where I'm going."</em></p><p> </p><p> </p><p>This waste had no smell. No overburden of miasma or perceived human wreckage. None to say that they had figured all that was of the world, and that there was nothing to find beyond what they had and what was already there. A memory of decomposition and human shit.</p><p>He humored that he should have been thankful for that. The garbage. It's rot. Filled with men sitting and their atrophy, foul with sewage and drainage and every other decipherable slime. Watching clouds past and partaking of nothing, sullen eyes, vexed faces. Strange marine corpses and parodies of corpses lining the shores, oozing into the fat of the landfill, no debris a stranger. No filth unabsolved. Perhaps he should have settled among it and know that he too had figured it out. Figured all of it out. The sun bludgeoning his scalp, he struggles to recall the comparatively soft agony of the cellophane island and wonders if it was indeed that unbearable.

</p><p>He did not know his destination in this exodus. Why here? Alex heard himself think. In all avenues in all fates of this life, here the dunes. He didn't know.</p><p>That there was nothing beyond all of it seemed reasonable. It's shallow hills and cracked expanse and obscene sun all absolute in it's futility. Infinite.</p><p>"Get up," Joel said. Then Joel had lifted him up. Steadily. And calm.</p><p>Alex coughed again, heaving nothing at his feet. Joel pinched at his rags and smoothed what seemed offensive over. The hand. The man. He remembers again.</p><p>He turned slightly and upwards to look at him, through the screen of heat, so intense it was to blur this face that was so close. Soft and tired black eyes, dark brow quivered as if in deep thought, mysterious under the cloak of the widebrim hat. He seemed strange and luminous in the shadows of his counters and the blackness of his coat, a western wanderer. He didn't hold the energy to wonder again at the phenomena of his existence. What coerced him to follow - to save him, to bring him out of that same sewage of what felt ages ago. The notion now seeming exceptionally outlandish. Suddenly struck by the fidelity of it all. He instead closed his eyes and opened them and looked at him again. Perhaps expecting him to be a mirage all this time. Alex managed an impassive smile, subtle under his whiskers.</p><p>He lowered his head and leaned against Joel, stealing shadow under his hat, this heat better, softer and tangible. The hand on his back held tight. Quiet and slight sensation against the noise of all his other woes. But it was enough.</p><p>Joel held Alex until he stopped heaving and felt certain that he would stand. Then they walked themselves on wards, slowly, across the desert.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>
  <em>"That doesn't matter to me."</em>
</p>
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